"Someone's got a motorboat down there," Lyons pointed. "Maybe they're waterskiing."
Blancanales focused his binoculars on the river. "That's no boat. That's a barge."
"Barge? It's too small."
"Check it out." He handed Lyons the binoculars. "It looks small because the river's about a half mile wide."
"Wow... you're right." Panning away from the sliver of water beneath them, Lyons scanned the vast carpet of unbroken jungle extending to the far horizon. "Oh, man, oh, man. Does that add perspective to what I'm looking at."
"Wherever we're going, whatever we're doing," Gadgets said as he snapped a panorama of three photos, "I sure hope we don't have to walk home."
Seconds after the DC-3 touched down, the copilot threw open the cockpit door and paced urgently down the length of the swaying plane as it taxied. He had shed his heavy coat, now wore a bright purple T-shirt tucked into his jeans. He grabbed the handstrap at the door to steady himself as he worked the latch lever. He pushed the door open.
"Move it, passengers! In three minutes, this here aircraft is back in the sky."
The copilot jerked a rope-handled crate to the doorway, waited until the plane slowed to a stop. Then he jumped out and pulled the crate after him.
Able Team followed him, one man after another, dropping the four feet to a field of mud. The hot, wet air closed around them like steam. In seconds, sweat beaded their faces.
The airstrip paralleled a river. Bulldozers had scraped a long straight flat on the riverbank. Huge piles of tangled brush and branches rotted in the mud at each end of the strip. An improvised dock of fifty-five-gallon drums extended a hundred feet into the slow, silt-dark river; rough-sawn planks lashed to the drums served as a walkway.
The copilot dragged the crate across the field. Six black men waited for him. The men were nearly naked, wearing only loincloths and weapons. Some held old shotguns, one man an M-1 carbine, one man a bow and long arrows.
"Black Indians?" Blancanales wondered out loud.
They slogged through the mud. As the three uniformed and well-equipped soldiers from the United States neared the group, they studied the Indians. The Indians ignored them. They gathered around the copilot as he clawed at the lid of the crate.
The Indians were not Negroes. Black paint covered the mahogany-brown skin. Some wore the paint solid. Some wore the paint in patterns. One man had his body and face black except for a rectangle around his eyes. Another wore the paint in horizontal bands across his body, like a snake's markings.
All the Indians wore their hair in knife-cut black bowls on top of their heads, their temples and necks shaved bare. They had either bones or feathers through their earlobes. At their waists, thongs of leather secured their loincloths. Web belts carried ammunition pouches and sheath knives. Most of the men wore leather sandals. One man sported rotting orange-and-blue jogging shoes.
Laughter and chatter broke out as the copilot lifted away the crate top. Inside, there were pump-action shotguns, machetes, boxes of cartridges, and plastic-wrapped packages. The copilot passed the first shotgun to the Indian who carried the M-l carbine.
Stroking the Parkerized finish, the Indian turned the Remington 870 twenty-inch shotgun over in his hands. He touched the black plastic of the stock and foregrip, pumped the action, snapped the trigger at the sky. He took a shotgun cartridge from a belt pouch, held it up against the extended magazine. He counted space for six cartridges. He grinned a white, perfect smile and slapped the copilot on the back. The copilot passed out shotguns to the other five Indians.
Overwhelmed by their good fortune, the group laughed and clacked actions and snapped triggers. The copilot and the apparent Indian leader — the man with the rectangle around his eyes — stepped away from the others. They talked in English for a few seconds, the Indian shaking the copilot's hand. Then the Indian's eyes fixed on the purple of the copilot's T-shirt for a moment. In an instant, the copilot pulled off the T-shirt and gave it to the Indian.
Blancanales nudged Lyons and Gadgets and told them, "That was a routine. The pilot didn't have that shirt on until we landed. He put it on so that he could give it away."
The copilot gestured toward the three waiting North Americans. The Indian looked at them and smiled his white flash. He waved as the copilot sprinted bare chested to the DC-3 and pulled himself up through the door. In thirty seconds, the plane was roaring over the distant treetops.
Only after the sound of the DC-3's engines had faded to nothing did the Indian turn to Able Team. Slinging his new shotgun over his shoulder, he came close to them. He extended his hand and spoke in curiously soft English. "Hello. Pleased to meet you. I am Thomas Jefferson Xavante. And I will take you to the city of slavery and death."
4
Following two Indian point men along a pathway through the stinking yet sometimes fragrant half darkness of the jungle, Lyons heard Blancanales and the Indian named Thomas Jefferson talking in English and Spanish and Portuguese. After introducing himself at the airfield, the Indian leader had said there was no time for questions, that they must move quickly, before the army came.
The Indians had loaded and slung their new Remington shotguns, then hacked apart the wooden shipping crate with their new black-bladed machetes and burned the wood. Each man had also received black nylon bandoliers and two boxes of shotgun shells. Now, they carried both their old weapons and their new Remingtons, the cartridge boxes and the plastic-wrapped bundles. The line of Indians wove quickly through a maze of trails, shoving fronds and branches and giant elephant-ear leaves aside with their shoulders.
The line of men moved through the shadowy darkness of triple-canopy rain forest. Above them, the tops of hundred-foot-tall trees shadowed a second layer of smaller trees. Below the lowest branches of the two levels of tree foliage, the ferns and vines and flowering plants blocked the last specks of direct sunlight.
As the men left the river miles behind, the heat became total. No leaf or frond moved unless they touched it, no wind stirred the heavy, dank air. Lyons sweated like never before in his life. Sweat completely soaked his faded gray fatigues before he had walked the first mile. Soon, sweat ran from the cuffs of his shirt. He felt sweat flowing down his legs. Sweat trickling from his close-cut hair stung his eyes.
Insects found his sweat. Flies wandered on his face until he wiped them away. Small beetles clung like multicolored buttons on his gray uniform. He heard a droning. He searched for the insect making the sound, looking above him, behind him. Finally he saw it: a wasp the size of a small bird. He flinched away, horrified, blundered into a fern silky with spiderwebs. An orange-and-violet-and-red spider tried to capture him. Lyons thrashed free. The Indian point men glanced back laughed.
In the distance, they heard a cacophony of bird songs and screeches. But when the men neared, despite their stealth, the birds went quiet. Only the insect sounds continued.
After an hour or more of walking, one of the point men came back to Lyons and motioned for him to pause. The Indian squatted. Lyons looked up the trail, couldn't see the first man. Lyons squatted, his knees almost touching the Indian, waited. Lyons took a squeeze bottle of insect repellent out of his thigh pocket and smeared it on his face and neck.
The Indian watched, his eyes white half coins in the black of his painted face. Lyons saw the Indian's eyes follow the bottle. Lyons held up the bottle, motioned for the Indian to watch. Then Lyons smeared the repellent on his left hand and wrist. Putting down the bottle, Lyons held up his hands to the flies and tiny beetles buzzing around him. Mimicking him, the Indian held up his hands.